Hal in Tavis's waiting room (p. 511)

Hal, numb-faced from the dentist, waits outside Tavis's office while Avril runs the under-13 girls' interviews next door. Even eavesdropped through a wall, the Macdonald-Chair prescriptivist registers first as syntax: the narrator grades her speech in her own professional terms. One clause, but it's the book's shorthand for how Avril's language always presents — control at the sentence level whatever the content is doing.